Nearsighted No More Trials of a new outpatient laser
surgery to correct nearsightedness combined with astigmatism are under way on
campus. If approved by the FDA, the procedure is expected to benefit many of the 10
million to 20 million people nationally who have compound myopic astigmatism, said
Dr. Edward E. Manche, the ophthalmologist who heads the program. "For most patients,
a few painless minutes with the laser procedure provide the potential for permanent
correction of their [vision problem], enabling the majority of patients to see well
without dependence on glasses or contact lenses," said Manche, acting assistant
professor of ophthalmology and newly appointed director of refractive surgery. The
computer-controlled laser system for treating simple myopia and compound myopic
astigmatism gives physicians greater precision and more versatility than the
traditional vision correction surgery, radial keratotomy, which has been available
for more than 15 years.

New Cancer Drug An experimental cancer drug developed
at Stanford is being tested to determine whether it might eliminate the need for
debilitating surgery while improving treatment for head and neck cancer. The new
drug, tirapazamine, attacks cancer cells that radiation and chemotherapy often miss,
said Dr. Harlan A. Pinto, assistant professor of medicine (oncology). These
tough-to-kill cancer cells usually resist chemotherapy because they lie farthest
from the blood vessels that deliver the tumor-destroying drugs. They also resist
radiation because they are low in oxygen, Pinto said. Although the current round of
testing focuses on head and neck cancer, tirapazamine also offers promise for
treating other soft-tissue tumors, including tumors of the breast, brain, cervix and
colorectal region. The final word on whether the drug will be effective in
combination with radiation should be available within two years.

Better Ways to Test Chips As computer chips grow
larger and more complex and are driven at ever higher speeds, manufacturers face
increasing difficulty in identifying defective chips. Now, Stanford's Center for
Reliable Computing and the specialty chip maker LSI Logic Corp. have embarked on a
three-year, $400,000 effort to
improve chip
testing methods. In the past,
manufacturers have approached the test problem by building bigger and faster
electronic testers. But this strategy is becoming prohibitively expensive, says E.
J. McCluskey, director of the reliable computing center and professor of electrical
engineering and computer science. McCluskey and his colleagues have opted instead to
develop improved testing methods, and will evaluate the effectiveness of more than
two dozen test techniques. "We have designed and built an integrated circuit whose
only point in life is to be tested. We will test it in lots of different ways,"
McCluskey said. The study will evaluate methods that test all aspects of
state-of-the-art integrated circuit performance including logic, memory and other
mixed signal circuits.

Novel 3-D Display Elizabeth Downing, a graduate
student working with electrical engineering Professor Lambertus Hesselink, has
developed
a prototype
video display that can produce 3-D images in a whole new way
- by creating actual three-dimensional color images inside a solid cube of
fluorescent glass. The technology, although still rudimentary, has a number of
potential applications, including medical imaging and air traffic control. The
technology is unique in that "it doesn't create an image that appears to be three
dimensional, it actually produces an image that is drawn in three dimensions,"
Downing says. "As a result, there are few restrictions on the viewing angle and a
number of people can view the images at the same time Also, the images are emissive
- they glow - rather than reflective, so they can be seen easily in
ordinary room light." The technology also has limitations. The objects that it forms
are transparent, not opaque, so additional processing would be required before it
would be suitable for entertainment purposes. It also takes 500 times as much data
to construct a three-dimensional object as it does to draw the same object in only
two dimensions. The research is reported in the Aug. 30 issue of the journal
Science. ST